I bought an actual physical book! Its called Wonderbook - The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction. I usually buy books on Kindle, but I wanted the lovely pictures for this one. Havent read more than a few pages. I’m going thru a few books on writing and the whole process, because I want to give nanowrimo a real go this year.
And when I’m not reading books on writing, I’m reading an oldie but a goody: Books of Blood by Clive Barker.
If you’d like recommendations I can offer you a few that I personally have enjoyed a lot.
Yes please, I’m always open to book recommendations. 
My TBR list currently has 37 Sci-Fi books, an indication of how little I’d read in the genre as anything else. Mainly just a few Iain M. Banks and the odd Peter F. Hamilton.
Next up is probably:
A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M.Miller Jr
OR
A Fire Upon the Deep - Verner Vinge
If you’ve read and have an opinion on either I’m all ears! As I am for any recommendations 
I have in fact read both, but not in many years for the Miller. I think A Fire upon the Deep is quite good (nearly everything by Vinge is good), but I find A Deepness in the Sky (in the same series, written later but taking place earlier and standing on its own) even better, for its wonderful aliens, its interesting treatment of the problem of translation, its conflicting human cultures, and its tense narrative (essentially the final third of the book is a sustained climax).
My favorite single body of science fiction is the twelve Heinlein juveniles: Rocket Ship Galileo, Space Cadet, Red Planet, Farmer in the Sky, Between Planets, The Rolling Stones, Starman Jones, The Star Beast, Tunnel in the Sky, Time for the Stars, Citizen of the Galaxy, and Have Space Suit—Will Travel. These were written as boys’ books, but the resulting constraints kept Heinlein from riding some of his hobby horses, and to my mind his portrayal of women is much better than was usual in the 1950s—I’m thinking in particular of a passage in The Rolling Stones where Edith Stone, an MD retired to raise a family, learns that a ship in a nearby orbit has an unknown disease that has killed its medical officer, and starts getting ready to go and give help; when her husband objects she simply says, “Roger, I am a doctor” and he backs down.
Other possibilities:
Lois McMaster Bujold, Barrayar, a sequel to Shards of Honor, and often included with it in Cordelia’s Honor: probably the closest that science fiction has come to grand opera.
Octavia Butler, Mind of My Mind, the first of a series, which I think is really brilliant in its treatment of psi powers; it’s in the spirit of Thucydides’ line “concerning gods we have the belief, and concerning humans the certainty, that each does what is in his power: the strong do what they can, the weak do what they must.”
C.J. Cherryh, The Pride of Chanur, a classic SF adventure story with really good aliens, starting when a ship of the leonine hani picks up a refugee belonging to an unknown species.
Michael Flynn, The Wreck of The River of Stars, the story of a disaster in outer space, which is equal parts a study in industrial failure and a classical tragedy.
Robert Heinlein, Double Star: His first novel to win the Hugo Award, and a classic example of his “the man who learned better” plot structure.
Donald Kingsbury, Courtship Rite, which I think is the best science fiction novel I’ve read; it has a profoundly alien culture, and did the trick of getting me into the minds of its characters so well that when Oelita the Heretic makes amends to her world’s God it made total sense to me; and it also has a consistent intellectual theme of optimization in domains ranging from biology to public choice to ethics.
Tim Powers, Declare, is a tightly plotted World War II spy thriller (impressively so for Powers, whose plots aren’t usually anything like that tight) that turns on what could be taken as supernatural horror but has a science fictional rationale.
Jack Williamson, Darker than You Think, another case of apparent supernatural horror with a science fictional rationale; its underlying logic seems to be akin to psychoanalysis, but with a Nietzschean rather than Freudian unconscious tied to a premise about human prehistory.
There are others that I like a lot, but I think those will do for a start. I hope you find some of them worthwhile.
Ooh, I have fond memories of Red Planet.
And Darker Than You Think turned up in the Fantasy Masterworks series, which I have a lot of time for.
Excellent, thanks a million! I’d a couple of Heinlein novels on my list already, though I’ve yet to read anything of his. I mostly seem to be switching between fantasy and sci-fi with each new book, so I reckon I’ve at least a 18 months of books lined up now. I’ll get back to you for some more when I start to run low!
Sci-fi is my jam (I write and self-publish sci-fi), but I have pretty immature tastes. I like space battles and laser swords over “high concept” sci-fi as a general rule (give me “The Lost Fleet” over “Dune” 9 times out of 10).
That stated, if you are looking for some good campy sci-fi that’s really well written and often extremely funny:
Allie Brosh is back!
Hyperbole and a half comics are seriously some of the funniest stories I’ve read, like laugh so hard and when someone asks why you are laughing and you can’t answer because you are laughing.
She wrote “Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened” one of the books I took to the hospital when I had my youngest.
New book just released, “Solutions and Other Problems” read a few chapters. Really it’s what 20/20 needs.
It’s like 2 pounds heavy, and filled with awesome.
I don’t consider it fantasy, myself; it made too much effort to have a scientific rationale for its marvels and wonders, taken on one hand from quantum mechanics and on the other from human evolutionary biology. It’s kind of akin to Lord of Light, which has a key passage explicitly denying that the rakshasa are supernatural, and whose Hindu “gods” are not actually gods, but mortal men with psionic powers. But it’s a really good book, whatever category you put it in.
Great, thanks for those. A couple I had on my list but some others I’d not heard of so I’ll add them now, much appreciated.
I have read Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained, probably about 5 or 6 years ago but remember enjoying them a lot and they were both on my list for a re-read.
I’ve shockingly poor memory which means I can come back to books and movies, even ones with a twist and I’ve a good chance of being surprised all over again!
Yes! My copy arrived a few days early and I ploughed throw it so quickly that I’d finished it by the originally stated delivery date 
It’s a book where I can finally use the “I laughed, I cried” cliche. She’s still incredibly funny, but she’s been through a lot since the last book and she really has a talent for putting things in a simple and devastating way.
I’m currently reading Jo Walton’s Or What You Will, which has so much going on in it that I can’t even attempt to say anything about the plot. It’s fantasy; it’s kind of metafictional, being a story about an author and the archetype embodied in many of her characters (who’s the primary point of view) and the characters in the novel she’s writing; it’s about Florence and the Italian Renaissance as a fantasy setting; it’s filled with Shakespearean references, including the marriage of Miranda and Caliban; I have no idea where the storyline is going, which I find really delightful.
Back when C and I were in Riverside, I read the three volumes of Robert Heinlein’s letters, which I found in the UC Riverside library. The third volume had his correspondence with Niven and Pournelle about The Mote in God’s Eye. He gave them very detailed advice, at levels ranging from plot structure (he thought they had begun the narrative several chapters too early in the flow of events) to specific word choices. It made me realize how conscious a literary craftsman Heinlein was, contrary to what is sometimes assumed about him (and I had somewhat shared that assumption before then)—and how much Niven and Pournelle owed him for the success of that book.
This is exactly what happens in the stopping me reading thread.
I am reading Napoleon of Notting Hill like a good citizen of a democratic republic on the rocks and then Heinlein keeps coming up here. Then that copy of Glory Road just looks so nice on that shelf. Turns out it’s even nicer out on the screen porch during a break from work.
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I just blasted through The Last Emperox and now I need something to read. I’ve got so many sci-fi series ‘in-progress’ and at least two of them are Hamilton’s.
I picked that up the other day! Now to dig out my e-reader.
After I finish Battle Ground by Jim Butcher, that is.
I re-read the whole universe of Honor Harrington by David Weber, over 30 books. I wanted some good and enjoyable space battles and something I already knew Sometimes I don’t want the tension of something new but a story I already know very well and I feel good in it. (At some point I will re-read Weber’s Safehold series, I always enjoyed my previous reads a lot too)
Now I started re-reading the Miles Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold. I enjoyed it a lot 10 years ago when I read it the first time because it was fun and light, but now while I am still enjoying it is not that good anymore to be honest. So I stop in the middle I guess and look for something else like… Old Man’s War, that sounds very interesting, thanks @Marx
After a 5-year or so hiatus from reading, I came back with a vengeance by tearing through the first three books of The Expanse in as many days. I was surprised by how interesting the world is. From my osmosis of the premise via the board game and the Amazon series, I expected it to be pretty Firefly-esque, but it’s a much more twisted, fleshed-out, and unique setting than I had envisioned. That said, the characters can be pretty heavy cliches, and a lot of the situations started to blur together a little bit, so I decided to take a break from the series.
Now, I’m currently reading Red Mars and… I think it’s good? It’s very slow and methodical, but the writing is excellent, and the descriptions of Mars and the various projects and debates help add a ton of depth to a pretty familiar premise. I have some bigger issues with the depictions of race and women, though. The depiction of Arabs and Muslims is… not great so far, and of the two primary female characters, one of them is implied to have slept her way to her position, immediately becomes obsessed with two men on the ship, and becomes almost neurotic about it in very short order. It’s also suggested that most Russian women are like this, and that Russian men have been emasculated by women for centuries. There are a lot of small things like that, where the author decides that people from country X just do things like Y, and that’s the way that entire country is. It might not be as bad as I think, but when 75 percent of the book is detailed description of Martian geographical formations, it stands out a lot more. Has anyone else read the book, and what do you think of it? Is it worth it to finish the series?
